Reload the Canons!

This series of articles is an attempt to play through The Canon of videogames: your Metroids, your Marios, your Zeldas, your Pokemons, that kind of thing.

Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Vriska as Fight Club Fan: A Bodyless and Timeless Persona Teaser Excerpt and Book Announcement

The following is an excerpt from my new Homestuck collection, A Bodyless and Timeless Persona, part of the essay "Is There A Text In This Classpect?" This essay, exclusive to the collection, applies reader-response theory to Homestuck in order to answer the question: "Just what is a Homestuck character, anyway?" The answer is, predictably, pretty weird and complicated. This excerpt comes from a section about one of the weirder things Homestuck characters represent: you, the reader. You can read a previous excerpt from the beginning of the essay here.

We have the
suggestion from the start of Homestuck, even if it's a suggestion
that comes pre-undermined, that the characters are... us, the
readers. This is the source of some real interpretive weirdness,
because it's not really possible to resolve the contradictions
present in the first few pages of John's introduction: in many ways
we do guide the actions of the characters, but once created the text
is static barring the occasional games and things. And if the comic
invites us to take on a role of far deeper identification than
normal, with sequences like John's trip through the timeline
demanding that we do actions for the characters, like entering
passwords in order to continue, it also continually reasserts the
autonomy of the characters and their ability to reject everything
from authorial intervention to our own desires for the narrative.

One of the weirder
instances of this comes midway through Act 6, with the line "You
are now Caliborn."

I always find this
moment really stunning, even when I know it's coming, because it
completes a kind of mirroring that appears throughout the narrative
where Caliborn is positioned as a dark mirror to the protagonists of
the comics, via visual and audio cues. Here, we finally get to "be"
Caliborn, like we are the other major characters, and while it's true
that we've "been" some much weirder stuff, I can't help but
find this particular move very portentous-seeming.

We "become"
Caliborn after he has entered his session, at a moment when he is
standing on his desolate home planet, having staunched the blood from
his self-inflicted leg amputation with pages of Homestuck fanfiction
originally pasted in a ~ATH manual. We're positioned as being this
character who has murdered, and will murder-by-proxy, a whole lot of
people we've presumably come to like (and who we've also "been"),
as he (we) actively tear up Homestuck's narrative.

But again,
immediately this call to identify with the character is undercut. We
get several pages of this narrative, stepping into Caliborn's
lack-of-shoe-and-also-one-robot-leg, and then suddenly, at the moment
when previously we've been given an intro sequence like John's at the
very beginning of the comic, Caliborn stares directly into the
reader's eyes and the narrator stumbles.

What follows is a
desperate attempt by the narrator (Hussie, now dead) to convince
you/Caliborn that you/Caliborn are definitely really having the
thoughts Hussie is ascribing to you/Caliborn. At this point the whole
illusion of identification collapses: our entire sense of whether we
can think the alien thoughts of Caliborn has been called into
question simply through the suggestion that "Caliborn's
thoughts" might not be his thoughts at all, but an external
imposition.

This is the problem
of Homestuck dramatized. Even as we as readers want to identify with
and in some sense become the characters, the narrative is always
putting up barriers and highlighting the limitations of that
identification, and of our ability to suspend our disbelief fully.

Now, for me, this is
great stuff, because suspension of disbelief and identification
aren't critical tools I'm really that enthusiastic about. Reader
response theory can actually help us to understand why. These
concepts seem to commonly be used to justify, at least in my
experience, an adherence to existing beliefs--an adherence to the
repertoire you already enter a text with. This can be used to justify
all sorts of shoddy worldbuilding, from excuses about the absolute
need to make everything as straight and white and male as possible,
to redesigning aliens to look as humanoid as possible because how
else will people find them relatable?

There's no way
around the fact that reading only to confirm your preconceptions
isn't exactly the mark of intellectual maturity. And while worrying
about suspension of disbelief and wanting to identify with characters
can be a valuable technique for drawing upon the repertoire in order
to make material accessible and draw the reader into the world of the
text, demanding that everything within a text confirm rather than
challenge the repertoire is problematic.

We've already seen
this with Mindfang's journal. I mean, Vriska and Aranea are basically
bad Fight Club fans, paying attention to the bulk of the story only
to crop off the ending in their heads, getting really enthused about
Tyler Durden without recognizing him for the parody of masculinity he
is.

Just as Vriska and
Aranea are seduced by Mindfang's journal, so too might readers be
seduced into overidentification with characters--characters, for
example, like Vriska and Aranea. We can see this in some of the
responses to the comic that depend upon a level of identification
that pretty much transparently throws out huge swaths of the text in
order to elevate one particular character to the status of True
Hero.

There is much that
we could dig into here. The outright incorrect information, for
example, both textually (the timeline was not rebooted "for
Vriska" but for Terezi--this is explicit in the text), and in
terms of fandom response (how you conclude that there are no strong
feelings in the fandom about Vriska Serket is beyond me). And there's
the bizarre assertion that not knowing whether to root for or against
a character makes them a bad "main character." But listen,
while I could devote endless pages to dissecting every grotesque knot
in this tangled interpretation of Homestuck, I'm not really
interested in that as much as I'm interested in the way this
particular reader does to Vriska Serket what Vriska Serket does to
Mindfang.

This is a picture of
a reader being utterly caught up in the mythology that the character
has constructed, trapped in an illusion that, apparently, no amount
of canon information can contradict. Consistency has been found in
the resonance between repertoire and the material of the character,
and so this over-identification takes hold. The result is that rather
than seeing the text as a whole, the writer sees only those bits
which conform to a predetermined reading. Rather than allowing for a
flexibility of interpretation compatible with an avant-garde
narrative, the writer here applies a rigid high school understanding
of drama with their chosen character cast as the grand hero, then
criticizes the text for not bending to accommodate them.

It's not that
radical reinterpretation is something I'm necessarily against. After
all, I'm the one who used the very theories I'm brandishing now to
argue that Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash totally definitely kissed in
this one episode of My Little Pony. But I think there's a real issue
when a text as experimental and dynamic and complex as Homestuck is
crammed into very narrow understandings of character behavior and
motivation. It radically diminishes the open possibilities of the
comic in a way that I honestly think does a huge disservice both to
the text and to our capacity as readers to challenge our own
understandings and expectations.

In Homestuck, then,
we're constantly vibrating between two poles, between the invitation
to over-identify with the character, the invitation for the character
to be the reader, and the recognition that characters overtly or
covertly resist this identification and our assumptions. The
ambiguity of "You" in Homestuck represents this
never-resolved tension, and it is one of the things that makes
Homestuck so compelling: a constant reminder that in some sense even
as we are stepping into the text as reader, we are being read, and
our own repertoire is being laid bare.

I am also intensely pleased to announce the second half of my collection series on Homestuck, which will focus on my first love in comics: form and the way Homestuck revolutionized the field of Hypercomics.

I present, A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities: Essays on Homestuck and Form

This collection features four articles on Homestuck's experimentation with comics and hypercomics as a medium, and the uniquely experimental fandom that these experiments spawned, as well as an all new exclusive article on the wave of hypercomics that Homestuck inspired. This collection will be the first pop-academic look at Homestuck's place within a wider history of the comics medium, and will be available to $5 backers of the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.